Interactions Beyond the Pandemic: Lessons Learned from Large-scale Emergency Remote Teaching in Higher Education

Abstract

Online education — given the enhanced access for diverse populations and flexible participation — has been a topic of interest for many computer science and learning science researchers. The sudden shift to online settings during the COVID-19 Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) provided a valuable opportunity to examine the use of educational technologies on a global scale with various digital readiness skills, beyond many past works that relied on small lab studies. Following a PRISMA-inspired methodology grounded on Moore’s three types of classroom interaction, this descriptive review investigates 22 empirical research papers published during the COVID-19 ERT era focused on higher-education online classrooms. We explore the empirical evidence reported in the collected corpus, and given how ERT remains a likely future occurrence, we suggest key directions for future research, including a new learning paradigm that centralizes and augments Learner-Content interaction to balance between flexibility and structure of online learning.

Matin Yarmand

Ph.D. Candidate

Nadir Weibel

Professor of Computer Science and Engineering